Archive for October, 2005

My PC is now up and running again, as good as new! I’ve installed everything I need, including a few things I didn’t have installed before (Freehand and Visual Studio, to name a couple) and the machine is STILL running loads faster than it did before. How do I know this for sure? Last night Microsoft AntiSpyware ran a scan on my machine and it took 20 minutes. Before, it would take 50+ mins!

And here’s me thinking about upgrading my PC. I think I might do anyway…

Tip: If your computer starts making funny clunking noises, be sure to backup everything of importance and go get a new hard drive. On Wednesday night it was doing exactly that. Even after a surface test and defrag it was still making the clunking. Then the next morning it just went off and the BIOS wouldn’t detect it! Bloody useless thing!

Then on Friday I got it working again! Hastely I copied all the important things off the drive (documents, downloads, emails etc). Then, a minute after I finished backing everything up, I got the blue screen of death! I haven’t had this on my computer for years, not since I first installed Windows XP on my PC. D’ya know what caused it? A chip on the faulty HDD… black as the night itself, bubbled, and burnt around the connectors to the circuit board. It must’ve shorted out or something.

Anyway, I’m in the process now of sorting out my 200Gb drive to boot up the pc instead and hopefully all will be well in the next 24 hours time!

Well, I’ve had one of my teeth out now. I was under the impression that I was going to have both out but that’s getting done another day, approximately a month from now. The whole procedure felt really weird, but I have to admit the most painful part of it was the injection. Once it kicked in, the tooth came out (albeit with some tugging) painlessly.

As of approximately 2:15pm today, I will no longer have all 32 teeth in my gob. I’m getting two wisdom teeth removed today and I’m not looking forward to it. The last time I had teeth removed was when I was very young and, because I was (and probably still am but it doesn’t bother me anymore) lactose intolerant, I wasn’t getting all the calcium I needed so *pop* out they went! Today, two of my wisdom teeth are growing at a funny angle and are decaying since I can’t reach all sides of them properly.

There’s a big difference between this time and the last time though. Last time, I was put under general anethetic and had one of the more frontal teeth removed. I woke up in the waiting room with blood pouring out of my mouth! This time, I’m only under local anthethetic (since almost nowhere gasses anyone anymore) and I’m having TWO removed from as far back as you can possibly get in a mouth without poking at the uvula (for those who don’t know, that’s the dangly bit at the back of the throat). I certainly didn’t like being gassed – I still remember the smell of it now – but in comparison to being injected into twice and staying conscious, I would’ve certainly given the former option some consideration if it were an option.

I think this would be the perfect situation in which to find out if my new dentist is trustworthy or not…

Anyone heard the new Feeder single? (If you haven’t then I strongly recommend that you do) Well it was brought to my attention by Nigel (Bassist – Nemo) that my name was on the hall of fame on the DVD copy of the new single.

If you’ve got a copy, go 25 seconds into it and take a look on the left. This is what you’ll see…

And it is! Just today I picked up a parcel from the local (yeah, right!) Royal Mail HQ and it just so happened to contain a copy of the oh-so-lovely Burnout: Revenge. Pretty much the same as the previous one but with a couple of new features and prettier graphics. I think my Uni work is going to suffer as a result!

Woke up this morning… stinking cold! I don’t feel like crap yet but I can see that on the horizon. It’s only a matter of time before what is currently a cough becomes something catastrophic. Better keep up with my Vitamin C intake until it blows over.

I went to my first practical session at Uni today – Enterprise Web Development. We seem to be doing things a little slowly at first, because we spent two hours writing up on all the different web languages on the net and why they were introduced. It will probably be next week when we finally get unleashed onto Visual Studio 2005. That works out ok because I’ve currently got a copy of it downloading and it’s gonna take ages.

Then later, I had work. Oh my GOD I can’t believe how irritating Wanadoo’s Wireless & Talk really is! We’ve had a permanent light on the phone and it’s been driving me insane! It’s as if I’m the only person who’s answering these calls… doesn’t surprise me, like. Gah!!!

I’ve just had to tidy up the code for this site so that it looked ok in firefox! It was hideous before! But that’s all part of being a website designer isn’t it? To design sites that work in all browsers? That’s one thing that I had neglected for such a long time… Oh well, doesn’t matter now! 😛

Andy Irvine is a web developer residing in the heart of High Peak, Derbyshire. He has over a decade of experience with various web technologies, specialising in OOPHP5, HTML5 and CSS3. He has created dozens of websites, and has worked with many Content Management Systems. In his spare time, he researches web technologies but he also enjoys playing guitar, photography, and cooking.